Content Delivery Network Strategies, by Stef van der Ziel

2002. Our first commercial product was XL Media Server. This was a commercialized version of the old parallelization trick I used to run multiple streaming services on a single web server.

XL Media Server now supported Darwin Streaming Server, Apache, RealVideo Server and Windows Media Server. It ran on Windows 2003 server.

I added user management, quota management features and standardized URL’s, content paths and log paths, so the server could be integrated in larger server environments.

XL Media Server has evolved into a solution that now supports Flash Media Server, Wowza Media Server, Lighttpd, IIS7 and Icecast. The API layer is enhanced with many integration services so XL Media Server can be used as a core, fallback, overflow or edge server in large CDN environments. It is just a building block. But a very powerful one:

• Native support for all popular delivery services. 100% compliancy is extremely important. I did not like what Helix Server did, and I did not like proprietary appliances that mimicked RTSP or MMS streaming.
• Native running services. No parallelization means no performance loss. And no virtualization costs.
• API layer for remote control. Generate accounts. Upload assets. Setup live streams. Readout status of assets. Download logs. The basic ingredients to use a server as a dynamic resource in a CDN cloud.
• Parallelization. Allows a CDN management system to dynamically use any of the delivery servers for any asset type. It saves the CDN operator on hardware, housing, power, management. He can dynamically utilize 100% of the CDN resources.

See xlmediaserver.com for the online presentation. We don’t sell XL Media Server anymore as a separate appliance. It is part of our VDO-X CDN suite, 100% unique IP and it can be installed on generic Intel servers, on Linux and Windows.